“A Disney Director Tried—And Failed—To Use an AI Hans Zimmer to Create a Soundtrack”, 2023-09-19 ():
When Gareth Edwards, the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, was thinking about the soundtrack for his upcoming movie about artificial intelligence, The Creator, he decided to try composing it with AI—and got “pretty d—n good” results.
“The cheeky part of me thought it’d be even better if we didn’t tell anyone—and we did the soundtrack and we kept it secret, like we invented a person’s name or something, and then when it was all done … ‘Ha ha, it was actually AI’”, Edwards said in a LinkedIn Live interview with MIT Technology Review.
Edwards had asked an unspecified AI music company to use the tech to create a soundtrack in the style of Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer.
The AI system generated a track that was maybe a “7 out of 10”, Edwards said. “But in the back of my head I was like, ‘But the reason you go to Hans Zimmer is for 10 out of 10’”, he added.
Edwards, who ended up using the real, flesh-and-blood human Hans Zimmer for the soundtrack of his movie, said he played the AI-generated track back to the composer. Zimmer, he said, found it amusing. Zimmer wasn’t reachable for comment.